Saving Elmo: Why we fought to protect one urban tree

IT BEGAN with three large letters: R.I.P. Normally on such a freezing night I'd have rushed straight by in my hurry to get home, but something caught my eye. Pinned to the trunk of a tree I had passed countless times was a scrap of paper – and those three letters.

I hadn't taken much notice of the tree before. It stood tall and solitary at the edge of a notorious roundabout, a welcome living thing in a sea of tarmac. It was a large elm with deeply fissured bark and sturdy upswept branches. I stretched my arms around its trunk: they scarcely reached half way. What did that ominous message mean?

Back home I discovered what the anonymous note-writer already knew: in two days the tree would be gone, felled as part of a scheme to reconfigure the roundabout to make it safer and more attractive. Streets first laid ...

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